Intro to Viz

Stat 365: Statistical Communication

Monday, April 29th1

Today we will…

  • Purpose & Structure of Graphs
  • A Taste of Visualization
  • A (brief-ish) History of Data Visualization
    • Jigsaw of Infographics
    • Recent-ish Data Visualization Forces
  • MP 2: Data Narrative Visualization

Use a graph when…1

  • The message is contained the shape of the variables (e.g. patterns, trends, and exceptions)
  • The display will be used to reveal relationships among whole sets of values.

Anatomy of a Graph1

A taste of visualization

Dear Data1

U.S. Gun Killings in 2018

NYT An Incalculable Loss

Data Art – Jill Pelto

A (brief-ish) History of Data Visualization

Jigsaw

An Interactive Timeline of the Most Iconic Infographics

Jigsaw

An Interactive Timeline of the Most Iconic Infographics

Jigsaw

An Interactive Timeline of the Most Iconic Infographics

  • Find your first group (number – A, 2, …, 5)
  • (~15 minutes) Learn about your assigned data visualization + statistician
    • A – William Playfair
    • 2 – John Snow (cholera)
    • 3 – Charles Joseph Minard
    • 4 – Statistical Atlas (Walker)
    • 5 – W.E.B. Du Bois (city + rural)
  • Find your second group (suit + back color)
  • (~15 minutes) Give a 2-3 minute spiel about what you learned

Recent-ish Data Visualization Forces

1915 - 2000

John Tukey

  • Statistician who rocked the boat

  • Proposed a method called Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA), which involves making many simple graphs and summary statistics to understand data.

  • “The greatest value of a picture is when it forces us to notice what we never expected to see.”

  • Got credit for the boxplot, but didn’t create it

  • prim9: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7XoW2qiFUA

1918 - 2010

Jacques Bertin

Cartographer and theorist

1943 -

William Cleveland1

  • Professor of statistics at Purdue
  • Did famous research about effectiveness of visualizations

Interactivity, brushing and linking

Luke Tierney1

xlsp-stat

1945 -

Leland Wilkinson

Statistician and software designer

Worked on SYSTAT, SPSS, Tableau, now H2O.ai

1979 -

Hadley Wickham

Famous R programmer

Implemented the grammar of graphics in R, ggplot2

Works at RStudio

Mike Bostock

Created d3.js, a javascript implementation of the grammar of graphics

Things are accelerating!

Data Narrative Visualization

To do

Data Narrative Visualization

  • Bring virtual draft to class for peer feedback on Monday, May 6th

One-number Story

  • Revise based on my provided feedback
  • Sign up for a live revision slot at xxx